[kahljorn]

"There's supposed to be a bunch of other gnostic myths about archons raping women and making them give birth to 'giants' or some such"
Sounds like the book of enoch, or as it is often called the Book of Giants. The giants were created by fallen angels(notice archons are often related to angels) who bred with humans.

For the rest:
Makes sense, the reason I assumed it had to do with becoming Sophia is because A) Sophia is related to Nature, materiality and Wisdom, which the tree would represent(seeing as how it's a tree of knowledge) B) Sophia was created by the "Divine female", as you said, and eve is considered that. Adam and eve were originally divine, then as the story goes they succombed to sin.
C) Sophia was, according to some of what I've read, created by emanating without her male counterpart. From what I understand in the gnostic approach there are no true males or females(as far as the spirit goes), only androgyne/triune(triune= male, female, androgyne, which is kind of weird if you consider the garden of eden had a male, a female and a "Snake"). Makes it kind of confusing, but anyway, the reason we supposedly fell is because we lost a piece of our Triune and our spirit is no longer complete, and I'm assuming the incasing in the material is a way to make up for it or fill the hole. Also the material is often considered the lack of a spirit, hence the story of Christos disappearing before his death. Hence my reasoning.

From what I understand of gnostics their actual philosophy goes back pretty far, and intermingles with many different cultures, so it makes sense there would be more than one consensus. Also, even when simon the magus was around there was several other people operating as gnostics, all of whom had different ideas of existance.

From what I've heard the "Soul" of the human is actually the blood. The 'spirit' exists within the heart, like the jewel in the lotus and the mustard seed of Christians. What you were saying about the spirit being weighed down by the material seems accurate enough.

I think part of the reason there is so many different creation myths is because they are explaining different processes by use of symbology. Scroll back to the part where I said alot of the use of gods and such has to do with psychology or some similar term(i really can't think of an appropriate word, but they are designed to represent certain transpired events).

"The whole idea that a spirit dispossesed of its body and soul is superior to the gods of creation is to me one of the most important of the gnostic beliefs"

You know, this brings something up I've been wondering about. Some people believe the fall(or our encasing in the material) happened because of a human mistake and we need to get back to where we were(hence the dread feeling you might get from most gnostics), while others believe it was actually divinely influenced and part of a "Plan"(maybe I'm over-extending on that point, but all the same). So I've been curious as to if coming here was supposed to make us superior to what we were before, or if we just got sucker punched.

Sorry if that's hard to read, I'm unfocused today.